Night Will Fall
A documentary about a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps buried by the British after the war.
The outer documentary is a bog-standard talking heads modern doc, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. Most of the talking heads are concentration camps survivors.
The inner documentary was started after the British liberated Bergen-Belsen and were horrified by what they saw. There was Soviet intelligence about Polish camps almost one year old by then, but they though the Soviets were making propaganda. The original purpose was to show the German people what they were supporting. People were brought in from neighbouring towns to witness, and some even fainted.
The film-makers faced a deluge of information and expanded the scope into a “warning to mankind” about what had happened. At some point Hitchcock was brought in to advise, and his contributions were making sure cinematic trickery was to be avoided, so that any accusations of fabrication were unfounded.
Some of those images are shown here, and they are literally unspeakable horrors. That footage is always silent, because any words is superfluous.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.